Harvest the Fire ANNOTATION
A story of politics and poetry, Jesse Nichol aspires to great work in an era when human greatness is in the past. He loves a revolutionary named Falaire, a woman determined to escape from the care of machines, now the masters of humanity. The great work of Falaire is freedom, and she must steal it from the machines.
FROM THE PUBLISHER
This is no less than the tale of the expansion of humanity to the limits of the solar system and beyond. It also chronicles the evolution of machine intelligence, until human and machine intelligences come into conflict in an age when the outward urge and the urge to change are the chief barriers to utopia for many humans - and for their machines. Harvest the Fire is a story of politics and poetry: of a poet, Jesse Nicol, who aspires to great work in an era when human literary greatness is apparently all in the past, who travels to the Moon and falls in love with a beautiful revolutionary, Falaire - a woman determined to escape from the care of machines. For the machines are now the masters of humanity, and the great work of Falaire is freedom, which must be stolen from the machines.
FROM THE CRITICS
Library Journal
In the far future, a poet and a revolutionary find themselves in the midst of a conspiracy to liberate the human spirit from the benevolent but stifling patronage of the machine intelligence: Teramind. Veteran sf author Anderson demonstrates his talent for prose and narrative economy in this latest addition to a series that includes Harvest of Stars (Tor Bks., 1993). Deceptive in its brevity and simplicity, this gemlike story of passion and the poetic soul belongs in most sf collections.
BookList - Carl Hays
This is the third volume (the last was The Stars Are Also Fire ) in Anderson's saga about humanity's strife-ridden future among the stars. Anderson spellbindingly demonstrates the complex rivalry between human and machine through the eyes of both a human and a cybernetic protagonist. Jesse Nicol is a Terran poet who longs for a greatness in his craft that only adventure can inspire and whose wish is granted by his love for the wild, moon-born revolutionary Falaire. Nicol's android counterpart, Venator, carries the resurrected consciousness of a long-dead human whose talents are needed by the ubiquitous Teramind to forestall a possible rebellion against the cybernetic-controlled Federation. The fates of poet and android intertwine when Venator tracks the rebel leader to a well-armed starship bound for the solar system's outermost world, Proserpina, and Nicol joins Falaire on board. Anderson fuses elegiac prose and a sweeping vision of man's technological future as only he can--brilliantly. Already, at its current three-book length, this is one the best sf future histories.
WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING
Fast, elegant, and visionary....Paul Anderson is one of the pillars of science fiction and this is Paul Anderson at his best. — Michael Swanwick
In Harvest the Fire, Paul Anderson, as always, demonstrates his extraordinary set of resources; extreme intelligence, flexibility, imagination, charm, an encyclopedic knowledge of everything worth knowing, and sheer linguistic facility. — Jack Vance
With Harvest the Fire, Paul Anderson takes us again to the farthest end of technology and human imagination. — Vernor Vinge
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